JANE Peckham, Deputy General Secretary of the NSU WT Teachers Union, said: “Schools in England are in an extremely poor condition. At the current rate, it would take over 350 years to rebuild all our state schools. We urge the DfE to be much more ambitious and commit to a significantly more ambitious funding for the project.”

She also drew attention to the high levels of asbestos still embedded across the school’s estate. “Over 80% of all schools have asbestos present on their estate. This means in those hundreds of thousands of teachers and pupils are at a daily risk of exposure. So, as well as the school rebuilding programme, a programme of phased removal of asbestos for schools not being rebuilt will also in our view be required.”

She added that “on average, primary schools are in a worse condition than secondary schools. And we do have concerns that there is a risk that the programme becomes focused on large schools. It's also a fact that many of the poorest buildings are located in areas with high deprivation. So, the programme has to have due regard to the socio-economic background of the communities that are served by schools when they're making decisions on potential rebuilds.”

Jonathan Hines, Managing Director of the architects Archetype, highlighted the “performance gap” between how much energy new buildings use as compared to how much they're designed to use.

He illustrated the scale of the problem with the example of a new school building which was consuming 23 times has much gas and overall, 4.7 times as much energy as predicted. “That's a scandal. And this is what's happening in new buildings all the time.”

A leading disciple for Passivhaus buildings, he commented: “The only solution to meeting this shortfall in performance, and that’s the only way we're going to be able to get to net zero, is by building buildings using Passivhaus standards.”

Chris Parkin from Cambridgeshire County Council detailed the council's successful school’s energy efficiency programme, which was set up to help schools manage their energy bills and reduce their carbon footprint. He explained: “We have been working with schools since 2014 and in that time, we've invested £12m pounds in energy efficiency upgrades across 63 schools in the county. And it's not just maintained schools that we work with. We also work with Academy schools. And over that time the programme's achieved around £820,000 per annum savings and energy bills and 3700 tonnes of co2 saved per annum.”

One of the key challenges in decarbonising schools is around heating, he said, as the majority of carbon footprint for a school comes from its heating. “And the only way you can really tackle that is by replacing boilers with low carbon heating solutions. So there's a commitment in that strategy to support schools and doing that.”

The programme has been financed by drawing on a £20m borrowing facility agreed by the council. “That was used to provide loans to schools in order to implement energy efficiency measures, with the loan repayments to be made from energy bills savings. So all the projects are designed so that the schools are able to repay the loans from savings on energy bills and still be in a net cash positive position. To assist a little bit, we played a clever game of staggering the interest rates that are charged on loans. So they're low in the early years when energy prices are low. And they increase over time as the value of the energy savings increases with increasing energy tariffs.”